217 Use Mindfulness To Gain Power and Opportunity Suggests Pamela Gold

Pamela Gold is a deeply spiritual and insightful thought leader. She’s been called a Modern Day Yoda, providing deep wisdom and inspiration to all who have an opportunity to connect with her. Pamela’s childhood was spent on the family farm in upstate New York and later she graduated from Yale University; entered the business world and met success at the young age of 24. After pausing to have a family, she then co-founded West Village Parents and went on to pursue her passion for fitness and wellness. Yoga became a new focus in her life and it connected her love of philosophy, science, psychology, and wellness, and eventually led her to discover her life's work: teaching inner peace as the key to our greatest evolution and ultimately, world peace.

Most Influential Person

Effect on Emotions

The more mindful we can be, the more we have a buffer between how we originally were going to react and how we chose to respond.

Feeling angry, feeling sad, feeling our emotions … that is never bad. Those feelings are always teaching us something; it's always an opportunity to learn.

The question is, how do we handle them? What are we going to do with that energy?

So, the more mindfulness that I have, the more power that I have moment to moment.

As I get triggered, I can use that as an opportunity. Own that opportunity to learn and to grow instead of pushing it out, blaming someone else, reacting in a way that's destructive to someone else.

At the end of the day, our relationships are based on trust so if we act out of these negative emotions and blame someone else for how we feel, we're going to be undermining the strength of our relationships.

Thoughts on Breathing

Breathing and our mind go hand in hand. On my website, I share a breathing guide. While we sometimes feel that we can't control our minds, we can always control our breath.

One of the things I learned in yoga school, and that I've played with and refined, is how, by focusing on different parts of our breath, we can kind of control and hack how our mind is handling something.

Bullying Story

I think every child is going to face times when people are unkind. Someone is putting their own needs in front of someone else's feelings.

Everything that I've learned up to this point has influenced my parenting. My children come home with stories about times when people are unkind.

One of the mantras I've taught them has been that it is never cool to be rude or to be unkind as they face, perhaps another child that is excluding them and being unkind and perhaps trying to make themselves feel better by being unkind.

Using this awareness that, no matter how imperfect we are in any given moment, you always can learn from the situation that you could have handled something more skillfully, with more grace, with more compassion yourself. But if someone is being unkind to you, that's on them.

When I was in fifth grade, I had a friend …. it was the end of the year party and there was this whole thing where we weren't going to have the party at her house, we were going to have the party at our house. I started to see that she was getting her feelings hurt, so I told her what was going on.

I kind of betrayed the confidence of my other friends in doing so. Understandably, my other friends were upset with me. That spiraled into some of my friends being very cruel and it was very hurtful.

At the time I didn't have the awareness to recognize that I could have done things better. If someone's being cruel or unkind, that's on them.